>> If one has >> a fossil of a leg or, better, a pelvis it is easy to recognize >> bipedalism. This attribute, by the way, appears in the fossil record >> without ANY precursors. >>
Paul Arveson replied:

>What would be a precursor to bipedalism? Tripedalism?>

This raises a very interesting point to me. What is a transitional form
and should they be expected in the form most christian apologists want? I
say no. My wife was born without hip-sockets. No one knows whether this
is a developmental or genetic error. I guess we will find out in a few
generations. But the point is, there was NO transitional form between her
and her parents. They all had hip-sockets. She didn't. So can I say
that her childhood disability appeared in the human world "without ANY
precursors."?

Thankfully in what at the time was a rather experimental surgery, they
corrected her condition and she is absolutely fine and could out run 3
healthy boys.

But the point is, what do we expect of a transitional form? What the
evolutionist means today is NOT what Darwin meant and what
anti-evolutionists insist evolutionists believe. Christian apologists
insist on what I call morphing--an infinite sequence of infinitesimal
changes in shape. Duane Gish writes:

"If neo-Darwinism were true, somewhere there should be a
universe of transitional intermediates, as Darwin said there had to
be. Where is it?" Phillip Johnson, "Darwinism: Science or
Naturalistic Philosophy?" Origins Research, Fall/Winter 1994, p. 6

It is true that Darwin believed this. But Darwin was wrong and lived over
100 years ago. What is currently conceived is that one feature will change
on one part of the body but it changes in the same fashion as my wife's
hip sockets changed. It changes rather suddenly. If the change is not a
deadly change, and the animal can make a living, then evolution will
continue and another body part will change. This can be seen in the
transition from fish to amphibian. The latest "fish" in the line had
partially evolved legs, gills and lungs and had lost some of the normal
fins which other fish had. The earliest tetrapods had gills and lungs and
workable feet and a skull that was quite similar to the fish. It seems
that the latest fish used his mis-shapen fins as paddles but they could
not support the weight of the individual. The inside of the earliest
tetrapod had a brain like a fish.

Even today one in about 10,000 horses is born with 3 toes rather than the
1 toe that is normal. The change from 1 to the 3-toed condition is
sudden. There is no gradual development of toes over a series of
generations. What happened is that the gene for the expression of 3 toed
horses was turned on less and less often and thus more and more of the
horses were born with only 1 toe. There was a period of time in which the
two forms lived and interbred.

In short, the transitional sequence is chimerical not an infinite sequence
of infinitesimal transitions. To demand that evolutionists hold the view
that most Christian apologists require is to demand that they believe
something that they don't believe. In other words it is to set up a
strawman.